Sorry to say it, but it's a terrible book. The first clue is the tiny bibliography: all western sources. As far as I know, Lord Kinross (who was not a professional historian) did not speak Turkish, and thus his book is extremely Eurocentric, full of all manner of Orientalist tropes. There are far too many problems for me to list.

 

However the biggest problem is simply its age: it was published in 1977. Since then, the field of Ottoman history has been totally revolutionized with new research. The entire basis of the book, the "Rise and Fall" narrative, has been discarded by modern historians. There is consensus among the modern academic community that the idea of the "Decline of the Ottoman Empire" was a myth produced by bad historiography. Since The Ottoman Centuries is entirely based on this paradigm, it means the whole book is compromised. Some quotes:

 

Metin Kunt, “Introduction to Part I,” in Süleyman the Magnificent and His Age: the Ottoman Empire in the Early Modern World, ed. Metin Kunt and Christine Woodhead (London and New York: Longman, 1995), 37-38.

“…students of Ottoman history have learned better than to discuss a “decline” which supposedly began during the reigns of Süleyman’s “ineffectual” successors and then continued for centuries. Süleyman’s sons and grandsons, as sultans, merely continued in the same detached imperial tradition that was first fashioned during Süleyman’s long reign. As for broader institutional and social fluctuations and dislocations, these are properly to be seen as features of a transition which eventually reached a new equilibrium in the seventeenth century. The “time of troubles” may have seemed of millennial significance to Ottomans themselves; we should see its features rather as aspects of the Ottoman effort to confront the challenges of a changing and widening world, beyond their frontiers and experience.”

 

Baki Tezcan, The Second Ottoman Empire: Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World (Cambridge University Press, 2010), 9.

“Ottomanist historians have produced several works in the last decades, revising the traditional understanding of this period from various angles, some of which were not even considered as topics of historical inquiry in the mid-twentieth century. Thanks to these works, the conventional narrative of Ottoman history – that in the late sixteenth century the Ottoman Empire entered a prolonged period of decline marked by steadily increasing military decay and institutional corruption – has been discarded.”

 

So yeah, tl;dr on Kinross: Don't read it. Too bad nearly every Wikipedia page on the Ottomans cites it.